France’s famous swimming pool museum takes over an abandoned mill

An Art Deco former swimming pool that’s become ‘France’s most popular museum’ has undergone a €9m expansion into an adjacent former mill.

La Piscine in Roubaix opened to the public in 2001, reviving a defunct but ornate 1932 swimming pool as a sculpture hall and museum. Its unexpected success saw numbers swell from a projected 60,000 visitors per year to over a quarter of a million.

The freshly completed, two-year-long expansion into the old textile factory was led by architect Jean-Paul Philippon, who oversaw the pool’s original adaptive reuse, and was re-enlisted for the new 2,300 sqm addition.

It houses a mix of temporary and permanent exhibitions relating to Roubaix’s industrial arts past, as well as Modern French sculpture.

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